Porn industry hard up for solutions to piracy problem

The porn industry has quietly coexisted with P2P services for many years, but …

The porn industry is sick of people pirating its content, and some players in the industry have finally decided to take an official stand against it. A group of 65 producers, attorneys, and other industry members held a piracy conference last week, billed as one of the first major roundtables for the industry to get together and address what has become a big problem for porn sales.

The porn industry has quietly coexisted with P2P services for many years, something that attorney Greg Piccionelli says has resulted in a very difficult environment for producers today. "The lack of enforcement over the years has left the pirates and consumers with the impression that copying and stealing adult content is something that has absolutely no punitive consequence associated with it whatsoever, and so the industry has really sort of dug its own grave to this degree," he said to the panel, according to the AVN Media Network.

With sales tanking quickly over the past several years in favor of free alternatives, the industry is now trying to figure out ways to stay afloat. Piccionelli estimates that no more than 15 or 20 percent of the porn in the wild is legitimate—for an estimated $50 billion industry, that could mean a lot in lost sales, although it is highly debatable whether many of those downloading XXX features on their P2P network of choice would have purchased those titles instead.

Attendees at the conference were split over how exactly to compete against pirates, however. Some wanted to focus on stopping piracy—a noble goal indeed—and one company even set up a web site for producers to post screenshots of pirated content for potential future use in lawsuits. "It's for any kind of stolen content," Shane's World VP Megan Stokes said. "[W]ith the time-stamp and the screenshot, it's something that we can start using as evidence in court cases."

Others hoped to learn new ways to adapt to digital distribution. "One of the ways of dealing with it is [...] an iTunes kind of situation where you have scene sales at a low enough price that appropriately deters people from stealing it," said Piccionelli. He also said that the industry could start to pair pirateable material—the movies—with nonpirateable material, such as t-shirts and other items to make legit sales more attractive. One thing that he doesn't want to focus on, however, is DRM, noting something that Hollywood still has yet to acknowledge: "I worry about [the producers] coming up with DRM or technological solutions, because they're not going to work."

The panel appointed a small group of producers to continue talks on the topic and attempt to get more studios involved in the industry movement against piracy. "If we all do it together, we'll be able to make a lot bigger impact," Stokes told AVN.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui